Tired of “never being enough” because of her skin tone, accent, background, Priyanka Shetty has created a wryly funny one-woman show tracing her emancipation from duty to following her heart. She’s an Indian software engineer who developed a following in India for her blogs and a theatre group on the side (couldn’t let the parents or aunties know), but dreamed of more. She might not be all the way where she wants to be yet, but in the meantime, Shetty is inviting audiences to a taste of her life. The humor, I think, gets her through a lot.
This is a well-written show with nicely calibrated humor that leaves you wanting to see Shetty in both in more work that she has written and in other roles. She’s a performer to watch.
The structure of the show is that Shetty is in her dressing room, preparing to go on and combatting a case of the nerves. She sends up quite the idiosyncratic prayer to a Hindu deity and using tarot cards, finds herself tracing her path from India to America—and most of it is not what she expected.
After graduating from university with a degree in IT, Shetty went to work as a software engineer. But the urge to create a life in the arts never left and she helped found a theatrical group that was garnering attention and notices in the media. At that point, she had decided she wanted to go to America to study acting and used these notices to help introduce this conversation to her mother. This does not go well.
And that introduced one of the funniest sequences in the show when Shetty plays both her mother and her younger self. In rapid-fire dialogue, she manages to cover the eternal quest for separation from parents and eternal longing for acceptance and support. But the rage and condemnation of her mother sends her to her brother to try to enlist his help. That she isn’t willing just to break off ties and go her own way speaks to a determination to maintain a link to family and be true to herself. It’s a wrenching process.
But she comes to America and joins a master’s of fine arts in acting at the University of Virginia. Her somewhat naïve vision of America as inclusive and diverse and welcoming is jolted as she deals with outright prejudice, stereotypes, and as being an unasked “representative” of India. This disparity in views and reality makes for some very funny observations, including some memorable observations about the Americanization of yoga, goats and chakras. But underneath the humor is the pain of rejection not for lack of talent but because of lack of inclusion; i.e., her realization that she’s the elephant in the room in America. Nevertheless, Shetty persists and slowly starts getting roles. One of the strongest points of the show is that Shetty doesn’t gloss over the difficulty in even getting an audition; she’s not sending out a simple, feel-good, if I can overcome it so can you message. She’s getting personal and honest about how close she came to giving up and the toll it took on her—and she was a very accomplished person before she took this leap.
This is a well-written show with nicely calibrated humor that leaves you wanting to see Shetty in both in more work that she has written and in other roles. She’s a performer to watch.
Running Time: About one hour and 10 minutes with no intermission.
Show Information: ‘The Elephant in the Room,’ was presented on November 23, 2019, at the Kennedy Center, Millennium Stage, Washington, DC. For more information regarding Priyanka Shetty and her schedule, please click here.
